The Dorklyst: The 7 Cheapest Moves in Videogame History

Some people say, "if it's in the game, then it's fair." These people are jerks. Disregarding manners or sportsmanship, they take what should be an enjoyable game and turn it into a never-ending source of frustration. Here's our tribute to the seven cheapest moves you can pull.

7.

Multiplayer games often require a degree of stealth, which is sometimes difficult when your opponents are literally in the same room as you. Imagine lining up a target in your sniper crosshairs when he suddenly has a psychic premonition and dives behind cover. Or having the entire enemy team throw you a surprise bullet party because they knew the location of that burnt-out jeep you happened to be looking at. Screen-peekers might as well be taking the game out of the system and stomping on it. Imagine if Nazis had been able to stare through the eyes of our boys back in WWII to deduce their location? We'd all be gaming in lederhosen right now. Do you like wearing comfortable pants? Yes? THENWHYAREYOUSTARING AT MY SCREEN!?

6.

Rushing is one of the most frustrating strategies out there. Popular in RTS games, the objective of "rushing" is to throw everything at your opponent right away, killing them with your pathetic low-level minions before they can build a defense. The obvious pro-rush argument is that both players could easily exploit the same strategy. But what's the point of an RTS game that's decided in the first 5 minutes? We buy these game to fill up the social lives we don't have. Slow down, man, the popular kids will still be partying in two hours, and they probably won't notice you staring longingly in through their window anyway. Spawn a few more zerglings and stay a while.

5.

Oddjob. Sagat. Kirby. Most multiplayer games have that one character that's considered cheap or unfair. Maybe the developers didn't notice the imbalance between characters (or maybe Tony Hawk paid Activision to ensure he was the best). Whatever the case may be, always picking Oddjob or the '98 Brazilian Soccer Team just to take advantage of their edge in competition can't be that rewarding. It's not that winning isn't everything. It definitely is. But when you do win, you want your opponents to be ruined husks, drooling in awe of your devastating skills, not whining about a flaw in game design.

4.

There's nothing worse than skillfully tracking down your enemy, sneaking up behind them, and then having some loudmouth 13-year-old catch you both with a lucky grenade shot. Great work, soldier! Your gun turns everything in a ten-foot radius into ground beef. Give it a medal, I guess. Sure, explosive-launching weapons exist in real life, but they're awkward and expensive to use, and are frowned upon when you're trying to kill a bad guy without pulverizing everyone else in the room. In game-world, these boomsticks are plentiful, light as a pistol, and handed out for free to people who think "fire at will" is an order to replace everything in the world with fire.